Start Location-Based Conversations With Qilroy

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Qilroy, a Qualcomm Service Labs-incubated project, launches today as a platform that groups tweets and other status updates by location. Like “calling a payphone at the mall,” Qilroy introduces a concept called peer-to-place communication, which enables multi-platform conversations to take place from anywhere in the world.

The name is a Qualcomm take-off of “Kilroy Was Here and the service lets users share their location with others and also see a visual of all the conversations happening around any location. Users can type in any zip code or place like “The Eiffel Tower” or “Athens, Greece” for instance and interact through the Qilroy platform, Facebook or Twitter with anyone in that location who is sending open updates from Twitter, Foursquare or Gowalla.

Qilroy plans on adding more geo-streams soon, and is currently sketching out a more direct and deeper integration with Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook Places. It also has recently added features like notifications that someone has replied to your Qilroy post (which they can do on Qilroy or on whatever native service they originally posted the update from) and the ability to see links to Twitpics or Tweetphotos as actual photos on the Qilroy wall.

Qilroy is ambitious but still very much in beta (the service showed me an error message when I tried to log in with my Twitter account and I experienced various other bugs). However, what’s redeemable about Qilroy is that it fills a current void around the ability to communicate around location, a capability that will only increasingly be more important as LBS services take center stage.

And project manager Mike Bailey is not afraid that the product will be quashed by the plethora of geo-locational services already available, “Tweetphoto, Facebook, Google Buzz, Foursquare, and Gowalla — we root for the success of these other services because they make the view of any area really rich.”

Qilroy is available today in the App Store and on the web at www.qilroy.com, and will be coming soon to Brew MP and Android Market.